Text Alerts
Posted on 11 May 2023 @ 7:31pm by Lieutenant Sibyl Danzer
Edited on on 16 May 2023 @ 5:31pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: OC/ SS Virgil
Timeline: MD09 morning & afternoon
3118 words - 6.2 OF Standard Post Measure
Sibyl had an advantage on a lot of people, people with homeworlds and daystars, and with internal clocks set in their youth to the rising and the setting of things. She'd rarely experienced life around the same star for very long. And she'd only been on Obsidian Command for a matter of weeks. Even so, Loki ruled very little of her plans. Instead her quarters were set to a controlled environment change, gradually moving from dark into energizing blue light, and shifting from the chill that helped with sound sleep to the warm that encouraged throwing off the covers. Although there was an alarm set as a back up, she rarely ever heard it. Once adjusted to her shift schedule, she just naturally rose before the alarm got around to announcing it was time. The internal sensors would pick up her wakeful life signs and cancel the alert, so she didn't even think about it now. Instead she would select some music; what musical genre was would depend on her latest kick, which right now was obscure flash-in-the-pan artists from Antica who had either brought back their folkroot into a nuwave revival or bashed it into a purposely over-saturated howl grunge sound... She would wear out the playlists until something else caught her fancy.
Sibyl bit into a morning bagel and slurped some Epher-protein shake for breakfast. Everyone hated Epher-protein— the rest of the crew on her father's ship, the Third Noon, had called it 'Effing Protein'— but Sibyl's Dad had raised her on it. Even the third hand out of date replicator unit the Third Noon had in the mess could do better, but he wanted his daughter to be ready for the worst, and able to live on rations rather than suffer in an emergency. So as it happened, her comfort food was everyone else's last ever choice, second only to dying of starvation. She did, however, like adding the fruit powder for a little supplemental flavor and nutrition.
Sibyl peeled out of her sleepwear and walked around between the dining area and her desk, checking messages and working through her breakfast, padding around in her bare feet and underwear, bobbing along to the Antican beats. Unbidden, she remembered mornings on the SS Virgil. Quieter ones, strangely. Mornings when they'd woken each other up with playful kissing or offerings of coffee or the sound of the holo being switched on, the volume left low. She remembered just having one another's presence, taken for granted. But she'd been on her own now longer than she had been married, by far. So it was strange that the shorter time living together really did leave the impression it did. Now she felt fine on her own, really, not needy like she knew some people to be. But she always had to fill the silence or it felt strange. Empty.
Limmi had been right last night. It was time to stop kicking this can down the road— the road with the ever widening fork growing in it. She picked up a personal comm linked pad and started to type out a message.
Hey Cliff—
She hit send. It was all she could think for a start. They hadn’t said much of anything for a lot of weeks. After sending the simple hail, she thumbed back through the old messages to try to recall if she had even told him she had made it to OC, or if she had only said she had gotten the assignment. Seeing as it was the last time they'd said anything at all to each other, it wasn’t far to scroll.
I got a new assignment. I'm shipping out to a Stardock in the 9th fleet.—
— Good on ya. Let me know how it suits.
That was all they had said the last time they had spoken. She hadn't realized she'd gone two months without any message at all. What had she expected? They were friendly strangers since she’d left for Academy, apart from a couple of arguments.
Sibyl waited a while to see if a return message would pop up. She stared at it while she pulled on socks and pants, and listened for a new message chirp while she went to replicate a fresh duty shirt. When no new message was making itself known she turned up the music so she would distract herself from over thinking why he wasn't getting back to her. It was probably a lot of subspace relay distance. Typical delay, anyway. She'd look up the Virgil's last flight plans when she logged in at her station in the CiC soon.
It was gamma shift on the Virgo and Clifford Bauer was just clocking out of his watch. Captain Brainard had come around with his usual morning grunts as they closed out their stations. Cliff was the third officer now, and had the gamma shift. He doubled in security and operational skills and had learned a good amount of the ship's maintenance and he was an okay pilot as pilots went. Everyone knew it was his intention to buy the captain out after investing most of his pay in Ferengi and Bolian stock markets that were doing quite well. Some might have mistaken the plan as ambitious, but in actuality, Cliff just didn't really have an ambition, so it seemed as good a plan as any to stay right where he was at, with something he knew how to do. While other deck hands came and went, while the ship itself had changed hands four times, Cliff was the one constant on the Virgil; he'd become such a fixture, no one seemed to notice him much, which was how Cliff preferred things.
His comm chirped as he was sliding down the ladder between the bridge and the access mezzanine, headed to the bunk rooms. When he got to the bottom, he pulled the reinforced comm unit from his utility pocket, expecting it was some junk message from Ceti Nine. They were the worst. When you got into port they soft hacked all the comms you had on you and would never stop spamming. As if anyone would ever use that much anti sag cream and hair regrowth elixir. He reflexively went to the spam sign but as his fat thumb came down over it, Cliff recognized the sender and quickly mashed the undo key. It was from Sibyl.
Shit. With how much moving and shaking she'd gotten up to as a fleetie, it was moments like this he was surprised she even still remembered he existed. He typed a quick reply.
—Hey Cliff
Hey, Spark—
Cliff waited a while, staring at his flashing cursor and wondering if he should say more. He scrubbed his scruffy face with his greasy hand and then dropped the comm back into his pocket. She'd messaged him. Let her tell him why. It was just the subspace relay system out here. Messages took a couple few minutes, sometimes hours, if the links were cycling.
The first half of her working hours had been spent in her office in tactical. Most of what she was doing lately involved getting Lt. Commander Ovim up to speed on everything she knew. She wasn't bothered by it in the least. In fact, Sibyl felt that organizing everything to present it to Limmi was a good exercise for herself, too. There was a lot of discovery still coming from the science and engineering teams working out of Bay A-9 on the alien ship debris. And Command Master Chief Hai Roa had a project with some engineers, working on a reclaimed mining bot that the pirates had used to attack the station. She was waiting for more details back on that project, wanting to put it into their official tactical playing deck of defensive possibilities; for now had just left it an open line item. She wasn't sure where Limmi might want to assign one defensive robot. She had piles upon piles of after action debriefs from the Attack on OC which she herself was only part of the way through reading and analysing. With the need to catch Limmi up on them, she had sorted them into certain parts of the action, trying to make sense of the pattern of events, and built a timeline to which to pin key notations from the variety of accounts. She was fairly proud of her timeline, as she was able to give some of the report reading to other Lieutenants in the department and have assistance with the construction. Patterns were clearly emerging and they were able to line up matching accounts and pick out anomalous ones.
A morning full of meetings, reports, and interdepartmental communications had made the morning fly by. It was time for a lunch break before she would need to take the second half of her shift at a tactical systems station in the CiC, Now that Limmi had taken up Alpha shift, bumping her to Beta. Sibyl knew she wasn't going to mind being on the Beta rotation. Sepandiyar and Zayne would now get their morning tactical briefings from Limmi, and be ensconced in their offices for the afternoon by the time Sibyl checked in. Which was fine by her. She never minded people who were all business. There just was not the kind of team building, trust and camaraderie that allowed her to feel comfortable or valued, the way she had on her previous postings, or now, working with Limmi. Empathically, she knew that to Commander Zayne, she counted for next to nothing. She could have been a hologram for all he cared. He was extremely reserved with who he trusted and, she could sense, seething underneath the surface. Sepandiyar was polite enough, but focused on such a high view and in need of so much secrecy that he was especially guarded around her questions, preferring to limit her involvement with any of the station affairs since he had taken up office here— hopefully the Admiral was going to find it easier to share his insights with the more qualified Lt Commander Ovim. DeHavilland, before she had left, had been much like Zayne towards Sibyl. Although at least Captain DeHavilland had remembered her name.
"Bah." She closed down her desk station. All those staff and ranking officers were Lt. Commander Ovim's problem now, the lot of them. It was a relief, really. Now Sibyl could focus her efforts with the Station tactical systems updates and the defensive preparations. Despite what Cliff thought about her, Sibyl wasn't so ambitious that she was eager to constantly be rubbing elbows with the upper management. She was happy with a career that moved at a more steady pace of advancement.
She got around to the replicator in the small mess hall in tactical, the one that served for longer meetings and working lunches. There were a few other officers and crewman already there, taking the kind of working lunches the place was designed for, with a greater table area in the center and reserved booths around the side for more focused semi-private discussion.
Sibyl took her tray to one of the side tables with the tall privacy sides around them, so, well, she could keep her thoughts to herself. As she shuffled her butt into the curved bench, she took her comm unit out and set it on the table, curious if Cliff had responded to her. But she hadn't realized she'd gotten sauce on her hand and subsequently all over the screen of the comm link. And she'd forgotten a napkin.
Sibyl looked both ways and seeing as no one happened to be looking just at that moment, licked the sauce off the screen, before reading it.
Hey Cliff—
—Hey, Spark
That was it? Just a 'Hey, Spark'? It had been her nickname then. The whole crew of the SS Third Noon had called her by it and Cliff had taken to, as well. Sibyl suspected it meant he was trying to be sweet, hung up on old times. She sighed. What was it she wanted to tell him? Well, she at least needed to get him up to speed first.
Hey Cliff—
—Hey, Spark
I'm pretty settled on my new posting now. Just wanted to let you know I'm okay.—
She left the comm unit out on the table as she ate, but her food was gone before anything new came in, and it was time to check in upstairs. She put the device back in her jacket pocket and went to return her tray to the slot.
Despite having the comm link beside his pillow since he'd fallen asleep with it in hand, Cliff slept through the soft alert chime of a new message. He was known for being a heavy sleeper, if he was known at all, and could sleep practically anywhere, anytime.
Hours later, there was a rude banging on the metal door to his bunk room and a gruff female voice shouting in the hall— Cliff's daily wake up call. "Hey, ya mite ridden scurvy bastard!"
"Get on then, fungus breath!" Cliff called back with the frog of sleep still croaking in his throat. That'd be the first mate, Hassiret, the old caitian. She really did have awful breath. Worse than her breath was her idea of a good breath mint. According to Hass, they were some kind of 'good bacteria' that were meant to scrub her predator teeth without need for brushing. But the mints made the whole bridge smell like moldy socks. 'Course it wasn't the right time for him to be casting aspersions on anyone else's breath. Not that there was anyone in his quarters to complain about his anymore. It used to be Sibyl wouldn't let him make out with her in the morning until he'd brushed and shaved. He had a very full beard now. It had been ten years since she left for Academy and there hadn't been a lot of other kissing.
He rolled out of his sleep sack and left it in a lump like he always did, then remembered something and rifled under the rumpled covers to find his comm link and check again.
—Hey Cliff
Hey, Spark—
—I'm pretty settled now, a couple weeks into a new posting on Obsidian Command. Just wanted to let you know I'm okay.
Letting his head clear, Cliff shuffled to the table where he'd left a few stale pastries from the mess that had been put out for the taking. He grabbed up a piece of cake and bit through it. It was kind of crusty, but still sweet, and the icing in the center had kept well enough. He scratched his belly and considered how to answer Sibyl. She said she was doing well, so probably he should be happy for her. That seemed about right. He started to add another response.
—Hey Cliff
Hey, Spark—
—I'm pretty settled now, a couple weeks into a new posting on Obsidian Command. Just wanted to let you know I'm okay.
Good to hear. Are you running the place yet? They make you Captain?—
Cliff popped the remainder of the stale cake into his wide maw all at once, dusted off his hands on his pants, then tucked the comm in his rear pocket. No sooner had he done so than it buzzed. He whipped it back out, and realizing he'd smudged it with icing, he licked it clean and read again. It seemed like they had a real time link all of a sudden and he tried to keep responding while he had her.
—Hey Cliff
Hey, Spark—
—I'm pretty settled now, a couple weeks into a new posting on Obsidian Command. Just wanted to let you know I'm okay.
Good to hear. Are you running the place yet? They make you Captain?—
—Almost. Assistant Chief of Tactical.
No kidding—
—I was Deputized yesterday.
Good on ya.—
—Are you on a new haul?
No, same one. Slow boat from Grazer. We'll actually be going through OC in about a week or so.—
How are you getting this good a subspace link?—
Spark?—
Did I lose ya?—
—Yeah, no I'm here. I tuned in on a secure deep space subspace relay near your position. I'm messaging you from the Starbase CiC now.
That's kind of cool. Not gonna lie.—
— I didn't know you were on a Grazer haul. There's some high level security alerts near your flight plan passage right now.
I seen them. All alert, no detail. Not sure what anyone expects us haulers to do.—
—It's serious. I can't say anything more.
Sounds hush hush.—
—Send in the Virgil's position. Use the network key I'm sending. I'll try to arrange you an escort.
An escort? What kind of escort?—
—I don't know. I'll see what we can scramble. Security alert in the system here is also high right now. Resources are difficult.
This sounds serious, Spark.—
Sitting at her station on the upper level in the vast CiC, with people moving around in the big open air of the center on hundreds of work stations, Sibyl began to type "I want to get divorced, not widowed," but then thought better of breaking the subject like that and cleared the line. She watched the cursor for a while before trying again.
It is serious. Stay safe.—
—I'll inform the Cap.
—Let's keep in touch, yeah?
I'll see you when you get to OC. We'll talk.—
—Sounds good
Sibyl closed the discussion and made sure to enter an escort request for the SS Virgil, with current tracking information, based on what she'd pinned down from her comm unit. The rest would be handled by other coordinators in tower control. She tried to return her own attention to the latest data on shielding system diagnostics, but she remained distracted in the back of her mind. It would be harder to do, but if Cliff happened to be coming through OC, they would need to have some of these things out in person. It would be better than how she had intended to break it by text messaging. More difficult, maybe. But for the best. She took a big breath in and a long, slow exhale.
Yeah. For the best.
